Rachel's Song - A Poem Tribute To Rachel Corrie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYcV38SEmA4&feature=related

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/tomhurndall.html
Excerpt:
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The Death of Tom Hurndall

Tom Hurndall moments before joining the nonviolent demonstration where he was shop by an Israeli sniper.

Tom Hurndall was in a coma for nine months after being shot in the head by an Israeli sniper.
He died January 13, 2004.

It is with great sadness that If Americans Knew shares with you the news of the passing away of Tom Hurndall.

Tom, 22, died Tuesday night in a London hospital due to complications with pneumonia. He had spent the past nine months in a vegetative state after being shot in the head by an Israeli sniper on April 11, 2003, while trying to escort children to safety in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestine.
Tom was a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led effort to bring internationals to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to aid the civilian population in non-violent resistance to the occupation.
At a hearing on Monday, a soldier arrested last week in connection with the shooting of Tom Hurndall, has finally been indicted on six charges : Aggravated Assault; two counts of Obstruction of Justice; Incitement to False Testimony; False Testimony; and Improper Conduct. A second soldier has been detained and is expected to be indicted on charges of Obstructing Justice and False Testimony.
As we grieve the death of Tom, let us not forget the ongoing catastrophic situation in Palestine that he was working to end. In fact, since he was shot, 407 Palestinians have been murdered and 1,990 have been injured. As Tom’s mother, Jocelyn, wrote recently in the UK Guardian, “It seems that life is cheap in the occupied territories. Different value attached to life depends on whether the victim happens to be Israeli, international or Palestinian.”
We ask that you write letters to the editor of your local newspaper regarding this incident. If your paper covered it, please thank them and ask them to report more on the plight of the Palestinian people. If your paper did not cover it, admonish them for it and demand to know why they consider Tom’s life, like so many in Palestine, unworthy of mention in their pages. Remember, as always, polite, concise, and to-the-point letters are more likely to be published.
For more information regarding Tom, please visit http://www.tomhurndall.co.uk/.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/12/20/18703142.php
Excerpt:
Title: The Future of Food: Film with Presentation on GMOs
START DATE: Thursday January 12
TIME: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location Details:
San Jose Peace & Justice Center
48 S. 7th St
San Jose, CA 95112
Event Type: Screening
Contact Name Shelby
Email Address coordinator [at] sanjosepeace.org
Phone Number 408-297-2299
Address 48 South 7th St., San Jose, CA 95112
"The Future of Food" offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled grocery store shelves for the past decade. This film examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world's food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture.
Presentation by Joyce Eden from the campaign Label GMOs.
Suggested Donation $5-10. No one turned away for lack of funds

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/12/15/18702836.php
Excerpt:
Today, the homeless in Fresno experienced some of the “tough love” that Larry Arce of the Rescue Mission likes to talk about. As the City Council was discussing an ordinance that would make it illegal for the homeless to camp on city property (ie. City Hall, an alleyway, sidewalks, etc) a crew of city workers was busy destroying homeless peoples property.

http://fresnoalliance.com/wordpress/?p=1313
Excerpt:

«2010 Election Information for Fresno County

Articles on the Homelessness Issue in FresnoArticles on the Homelessness Issue in Fresno

(in chronological order)
updated December 28 2011

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2004/06/22/16865301.php
Excerpt:

YOU are encouraged to post your news, comments, event announcements, etc
to the site!

SF Bay Area Independent Media Center (http://bayarea.indymedia.org/ or
http://www.indybay.org/) is an open publishing website, which means that
YOU are encouraged to post your news, comments, event announcements, etc
to the site! Posts to the newswire automatically go to the
"breaking/other" section on the front page. Editors categorize them
according to whether or not they are news and have local or global import.
These steps might seem like a pain in the butt at first, but once you get
used to them you can almost do them with your eyes closed. We want to
have more people posting their news to the site- from event announcements
to reports on what happened at the police commission hearing or whatever,
we want people to tell their stories.

A simple car accident ... or was it?

Audio Threat from Brian's answering machine prior to his death: http://www.apfn.net/dcia/threat
Brian Quig on BlackOp Radio: http://www.apfn.net/dcia/black22a.mp3

A simple car accident ... or was it?

Thursday, January 5, 2012 1:29 PMMessage bodyNews & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/05/zapatistas-18-years-of-rebellion-and-resistance/
January 05, 2012
Another Way of Seeing the World
Zapatistas: 18 Years of Rebellion and Resistance
by MARCELA SALAS CASSANI
Hundreds of activists and academics from around the world gathered at
the International Seminar “Planet Earth: Anti-Systemic Movements” to
discuss the importance of the 1994 Zapatista uprising on its 18th
anniversary. In the context of the popular insurrections that have
emerged this year across the globe, the seminar held from Dec. 30 to
Jan. 2 in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, concluded, with
Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, that seen in
retrospect Zapatista influence has been so strong that “one cannot view
the left or the struggle against capitalism without this point of
reference.”
De Sousa Santos stated that the explosion of the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) on the scene January 1, 1994 was the first
major moment of global resistance to neoliberalism. The uprising gave
visibility to indigenous struggles that had been growing since the
eighties in Latin America and soon became the precursor to other movements.
“They taught us another way of seeing the world. They broke with Marxist
orthodoxy by developing a new discourse, a new semantics and new ideas.
They taught us a new organizational logic that had a fundamental
influence on the whole world,” De Sousa Santos said in an interview.
Paulina Fernandez, a professor of Political Science at UNAM who has
followed the Zapatista movement since its inception, spoke to
Desinformemonos about the transcendence of the Zapatistas. “It is still
not possible to see clearly the magnitude of the importance of the
Zapatista uprising. I track the news on Internet everyday and the EZLN
is cited all over for one reason or another—it is a permanent reference.”
“Despite efforts to silence them, hide them away, marginalize them and
isolate the movement up in the mountains, and without media information
about what they are doing, the Zapatistas are building a real
alternative process on a daily basis. They are proof that this country
can function in a different way when its people are committed and they
do it without the intervention of laws, institutions, parties,
politicians and the vices and practices that official institutions are
the ones guilty of the corruption of this country,” added Fernandez.
Representatives of indigenous peoples, among them Salvador Campanur,
Purhépecha from Cherán, Michoacán and Santos de la Cruz, Wixárika from
Bancos de San Hipólito, Durango, agreed that “in all the processes that
we have experienced as indigenous peoples, the Zapatistas have been very
important. Before, indigenous struggles were isolated and not linked up,
but since 1994 we began to realize that we suffered from a common
problem and we began to interact and develop solidarity between peoples,
not only in Mexico but in the world.”
Campanur noted “Although the words ‘dignity’, ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’
already existed it was the Zapatista brothers and sisters who in 1994
taught us to use them in each one of our struggles.”
Javier Sicilia, poet and leader of the Movement for Peace with Justice
and Dignity, said in an interview that “the last 18 years have been
fundamental since the Zapatistas–by revealing the negation of the
indigenous world that had been going on for centuries–also revealed the
dysfunction of the State and the neoliberal system, and gave new content
and new possibilities not only to the nation but to the entire world.”
New Movements and the Zapatistas
Many participants linked the Zapatista movement to the new movements in
Spain, Greece, the United States, Tunis, Egypt, Yemen and others. French
historian Jerome Baschet stated that, “The logic of capitalism is
causing us to lose control of our lives and it is time to recuperate
that control. The world movement has arisen as a crossroads of all
struggles: the struggle against the looting of material goods, of land,
of ways of life, of the capacity to decide. It is a movement that calls
on everyone who feels dispossessed.” He added that the latest uprisings
“reflect a general sense of injustice and the possibility that a
collective awakening could intensify the reactions of rejection that
we’ve seen so far.”
Feminist anthropologist Mercedes Olivera observed that the Zapatista
communities have developed outside the mercantilist logic, which can be
a viable point of departure for “men and women to dare to experience the
construction of another civilization based on solidarity not
exploitation, to try to recreate the human sense of existence, recover
the vital sense of the land and the sustainability of production for
consumption, to be able to practice new forms of using and caring for
natural resources, and in this way we can change and reorient our
strategies toward building a new paradigm of development and attempt a
civilizing process based on life and not on destruction, like the
Zapatistas do in their autonomy.”
In the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States that has spread
to cities throughout that country and the rest of the world “there are
many people who have been strongly influenced by the Zapatista
struggle”, says Marlina of the Movimiento por la Justicia en el Barrio
(Movement for Justice in the Barrio), a Latino collective that forms
part of the Other Campaign in New York City and the Occupy Wall Street
movement. Marlina asserts that “what many people of the Occupy movement
are trying to do is break the relationship between capital and
humanity”, noting that the Zapatistas have provided clear and inspiring
messages for people in the United States. “The Zapatista resistance
encourages us to keep up the struggle to build a different world,”
Marlina concluded.
She recounted that “women from the movement came one night to Liberty
Plaza and instead of talking about economic policies and political
struggles, they talked about what it means to be a woman, a mother and a
mestiza in the United States. They talked about their families and their
dignity, and I cried during the talk because for me the discourse on
“right living” or “vivir bien” was something really different from the
fancy discourse on economic policies. And I believe that the power of
the Movement for Justice in the Barrio is to talk about the truth of
human experience and the truth of the devastation of the earth, and
that’s a discourse that cannot necessarily be understood in capitalist
terms.”
Daniela Carrasco attended the seminar in representation of one of the
most important movements of 2011: the Chilean student movement. A
Chilean student from the collective Tendencia Estudiantil
Revolucionaria, Carrasco reflected on the lessons of the Zapatistas for
the Latin America student movement.
“The great example that we have taken from the Zapatista movement is the
assembly as a from of organization. For many years, the Chilean movement
was characterized as very bureaucratic and personalist, its was focused
on certain presidents that ended up negotiating with the government and
often betraying the movement. This year this logic was broken, the
rightwing that formed part of the Confederation of Students was kicked
out and the assembly was adopted as the method of validating all
decisions we make. We got to the point where we even voted on building a
barricade—yes or no—in an assembly and this has been really satisfying.
All our members vote raising their hands, knowing that they are
participating and not just spectators, in an act of taking back the
struggle in the streets.”
“For a long time, it was said that students didn’t participate, that
they didn’t have political training, that they weren’t involved in
almost anything, that they didn’t care what happened in society. But
this year, the panel members of the seminar agreed, “has shown the
opposite in Latin American, in the United States, in Arab countries and
in Europe, where youth—sick of a system that produces inequality,
poverty, unemployment and hopelessness—are questioning what is happening
and are going beyond protest,” said Carrasco. “We built a Chilean
movement that is expanding into a ‘student spring’– in Colombia, in
Costa Rica, in Mexico…”
Carlos Marentes, of the Unión de Trabajadores Agrícolas Fronterizos
(Union of Border Agricultural Workers) of El Paso, Texas, told the
crowd, “the Zapatista influence continues to extend among us, especially
around the need to organize from below with other movements and the
importance of pushing an alternative to the industrial model of
agriculture that threatens our planet.”
Intellectuals Weigh In
Fernanda Navarro, doctor in Philosophy who has followed the Zapatista
movement since 1994, spoke at the afternoon panel the last day of the
seminar. She told Desinformémonos that the main challenges facing the
Zapatistas “are to continue to build autonomy, strengthening themselves
and to prove that bad governments and corruption and violence cannot
uproot the seeds that have been planted and what is growing in the
Chiapan mountains.”
The Zapatista movement “was a totally new political phenomenon that
broke the mold and that’s why it has become a point of reference for
many movements for social justice for women, small farmers, workers,
people who live on the margins, due to their innovative ways of existing
that broke with class Marxism,” Sylvia Marcos, professor and researcher
on gender issues, told Desinformémonos.
Julieta Paredes, of the Bolivian organization Women Creating Community
condemned the way in which social movements usually see women as “just
another sector” and women’s issues “as just one among many issues of the
left.”
“But women are half of all sectors and half of all issues, and community
feminism-a category of analysis that represents the movement she forms
part of–locates patriarchy as a system that articulates all oppressions,
historically built on the oppression of women. In this sense through the
defeat of patriarchy, “the community can encompass the entire social
body to be able to build relationships of freedom.”
Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, a prominent Mexican intellectual, was unable to
attend but sent a message to the seminar stating, “Just consider the
immense mobilization of the indignados and the Occupy movement that
struggle for the another possible world… There has never been a
[mobilization] of this magnitude, and the mobilization began in the
jungles of Chiapas with the principles of inclusion and dialogue.”
Gonzalez Casanova added “increasingly throughout the world people are
struggling for what in 1994 seemed only ‘a post-modern indigenous
rebellion.’”
Marcela Salas Cassani writes for Desinformemonos.org, an “autonomous,
global communications project” and sister organization to the Americas
Program, that covers grassroots movements throughout the world and the
ideas and aspirations behind them. Its team has been in San Cristobal de
las Casas, Chiapas reporting on an international seminar there to
commemorate and reflect on the 18th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising.

Heavens Task Force

Friday, December 30, 2011

Indybay site/Brad Will worked for IndyMedia and I've put Solidarity song here dedicated to his memory

Rachel's Song - A Poem Tribute To Rachel Corrie

The Death of Tom Hurndall

Articles on the Homelessness Issue in FresnoArticles on the Homelessness Issue in Fresno

A simple car accident ... or was it?

A simple car accident ... or was it?

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